Will social media kill the PR star?

Interesting article by Jennifer Leggio on how the PR industry is trying to adapt to a social media world:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=315

Key quote from Jennifer: "The way I see it, social media isn’t putting PR in jeopardy, but it has exposed a weakness in PR that was always there — too much focus on dialing for dollars and not enough focus on making PR stretch to support real business initiatives."

To paraphrase Little Jimmy Carville, It's the business, stupid!

Comments

[Ken Krause]

Lots of good insight here, especially the quote you pulled out. Too many marketing and PR people focus either on clever or being tactical without understanding what drives business. Social media tools are just that -- tools. Their value comes in how they can contribute to what you want to do. A hammer is great at pounding in nails and other things, but not very good if your objective is to screw something in.

I personally find Twitter to be a lot of noise on the surface. But I am finding it's really valuable for listening. Running a search on a company name in Twitter reveals good and bad things, but mostly it reveals things that require action. Not traditional PR, perhaps, but very valuable for clients to know.

If all you're doing is pushing out press releases you could find yourself irrelvant. But if you're telling clients things they didn't know (but should) they'll find a reason to keep you around.